VSTa 1.6.2 update

Hello, VSTa interessees.

Just a quick update on the doings on VSTa. I have svgalib ported, and
just this afternoon got the "vgatest" program to run, correctly probe for
my video chip, offer a (correct) list of modes, switch to different modes,
do graphics, and switch back. My next step is to marry this with MGR, so
that MGR can run against any supported svgalib frame buffer, using all
those extended video modes. MGR is surprisingly nice, but I *was* getting
a little tired of 640x480!

One weird side note: after returning to text mode, my LCD display is
generating a very high pitched whine. Anybody recognize this as a common
symptom of video card programming?

I still haven't been able to test native VSTa on a FAT-32 system; GNU GRUB
0.5.94 claims to have a rewritten FAT-32, but although they've pushed out
source, they haven't provided binaries. My tool chain (on either VSTa or
FreeBSD) can't hack their sources (looks like a bunch of 16-bit gas
weirdness), so if somebody could cook up a stage1/stage2 for me, I'd be
much obliged.

Attached below is the feature list so far for 1.6.2. Comments are
obviously welcome!

Andy

FAT-32 support.
Fix race condition in parallel threads faulting same vaddr.
Fix bug in execvp which would sometimes hose the last argument
M_TIME is gone. RIP.
Add select() emulation. select() is supported by ka9q/networking,
        MGR terminals, and the console(s).
Fix bug in grep(1), which used the wrong value of O_RDONLY.
Fix crash when fork()'ing while another thread is blocked in
        a msg_connect attempt.
Fix hang when quitting MGR (had to hit a key on the terminal to
        actually let it exit).
MGR's $HOME/mgr.rc file now works... example in /vsta/guest.
Port of ctags.
Cleaned up MGR's "resetwin" command.
Implemented ephemeral threads to support alarm(), SIGCHLD, etc.
        See sched_op().
Implemented ANSI C atexit().
Low-level VSTa event handler API, handle_event() from <event.h>
Fix crash when m_to_sm() fails, but a segment cleanup is attempted anyway.
DOS now maps ".<file>" to "_<file". Renamed sh.profile to _shrc,
        rh.rc to _rhrc, mgr.rc to _mgrrc. _exrc for vim remains the same.
Re-org of makefile structure; creation of global makefile.all.
Move a bunch of binary ports to a new vsta/src/bin/ports subdir.
Create a vsta/src/include, which holds the RCS-managed versions.
        The "make install" phase copies header files to their
        place in vsta/include.
POSIX signal emulation. This is all the signal set handling stuff
        beyond the basic signal() API (which has existed for a while).
User and system CPU times of getrusage() are now filled in.
clock_t and clock() are now supported.
A <linux.h> has some stuff useful for porting Linux programs.
Received on Mon Mar 27 17:17:20 2000